4 Responses to Who Copies the Copymen?

“But he’s wrong, and he’s wrong in the worst sort of way — he’s being a complete hypocrite.”

But being hypocritical does not mean you are wrong now, it means you are inconsistent. If Jack the Ripper tells us, “Murder is evil, he is not wrong because he is hypocritical: he is merely inconsistent.

True, if one considers just one of the two inconsistent theses. But if one considers their conjunction, that conjunction must be false. So what Moore’s hypocrisy renders false is the entire conjunction of a) Before Watchmen is shamelessly awful because it incorporates other authors’ characters, with b) Moore’s work, which also incorporates other authors’ characters, is not shamelessly awful.

I find Hughes’ argument to be unconvincing. Moore didn’t say it was because of the characters, he talked about the Watchmen piece at large, by referencing Moby-Dick. In the works Hughes mentioned, Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore took the characters and imagined them in a universe of his own creation.

Moore and Gibbons already told the Watchmen characters’ back stories. We already know what we need to know about them. No further information is necessary. I would oppose the project even if Moore and Gibbons were behind it. I opposed the new Star Wars trilogy because Lucas was merely telling a story he had already told in the original trilogy.

I am not opposed to something like “The Seven Percent Solution” or “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” because we don’t know much about the Holmes/Watson et al. characters. It’s easy to add or subtract information in the same style as Doyle because we aren’t given much information in the first place. Holmes’ personal history isn’t relevant to the stories. The Watchmen characters’ biographies are integral to the larger Watchmen story. Re-writing those biographies could harm the way people think about the original story.